One of my OS class assignments was writing an allocator. It was scored by running some artificial workloads and measuring the memory overhead. The results from

One of my OS class assignments was writing an allocator. It was scored by running some artificial workloads and measuring the memory overhead. The results from past years were public and included the test case names like "PowersOfTwo" or "Primes". So instead of a generic allocator some of us optimized for the test suite :) I managed to get one of the all time high scores by implementing a variable length integer encoding scheme that could fit powers of two, primes and other "interesting" numbers up to some size into one or two bytes.